This is me with over 30 years of CG under my belt coming in as an individual and not as a member of the FS team saying I have some really cool ideas of how you can use 3ds Max to create your own development pipeline that can be used in “any” game engine available today.

You can easily re-task a designed map to run in any game engine and in the process create any needed professional grade material type including real deal light maps at a push of a button once you have the set up in place.

The fail here is in the lack of understanding the opportunity is not yet another stab at an individual problem that I simple do not have the ability to fix....period.

On our site I have to put up with a lot of crap but I have neither the time or desire to try and teach new progressive ideas to a community where all that is required is an understanding of the machine called 3ds Max and how it can be used to solve “your” own problems.

Note: This is neither rage or ranting but just the reality of the world I live in and since this is your community I'm not going to stick around if I don't feel welcomed.

I have never really felt the need to moderate this forum before and I would really rather just keep my mouth shut now, but I worry for this forum. Everytime we take a step forward we end up taking two steps back and it's getting us nowhere.

Rayne, I understand you have had your problems with FS in the past and possibly with FrankyV personally (I dont know) but your replies to his offer are unproductive. You may not want to map for this game anymore and that's fine, you dont have to and you're not the only one, but why take the oppertunity to learn something away from others. Both DagF and Johnny are interested in what Franky V has to teach them, so your attitude is their loss. You could have taken this issue up privately and lessened the impact on the wider CMM community or you could have just said nothing at all. Rayne, you are a talented mapper and modeler and I appreciate that there may have been times when trying to work with FS was difficult or frustrating, but it's time to move on. If you see a topic and think you can help with the issue your knowledge and input will always be greatfully recieved, if there is something or someone that you dont like, just ignore it.

FrankyV, one persons views and opinions do not reflect those of the entire CMM community and there are people here who still enjoy both playing and mapping for Urban Terror. I know CMM and FS havnt always had a great relationship but I hope you will still consider working with those who are interested in what you have to teach them.

I don't have a grudge with Frankie, i love the guy, he's the only one that actually helped me out. And i know for a fact he's pushing some great stuff into the development. I do have a grudge with some other people that could do something but refuse to listen. And yes i flew off the handle and insulted Frankie and for that i apologize to him. Frankie if you want to help these guys out and share some knowledge with them feel free to do so, i give you my word i will stay out of this if i can't be of any help.

OK Rayne no harm no foul but I was a bit surprised at your reaction so lets deal with the issue in hand.

To put it simply I would not count on any improvements as far as graphics go as the logistics are just to great to add to an engine that was never intended to be pushed as far as we have gone for a game called Urban Terror.

The bottom line it's a miracle that our game code even runs on the idtech3 engine and it's safe to say that a lot of the code is voodoo magic held together by hacks that are designed to make content function using code due to the mod nature of the game still built as a mod under Quake 3.

It's not that we don't want to do the cool stuff, as we have tied, but every attempt to do so only resulted in moving backwards with loss of work already completed and with each release something totally unrelated and considered fix gets broken and no amount or regression testing will catch them until after release and under player loads.

This is how it is for everyone and not just those who play the game.

Next Frozen Sand is a company for the purpose of doing the business of business for the purpose of paying taxes and as the holding company for all things that “must” be licensed. Having five or six people paying different bills under different names is not smart.

The balk of the team, which is about 50 right now if we included all departments (even more if we included QA) don't even know how Frozen Sand functions as a business and are just members of the community called Urban Terror who show up asking how they can help make the game better under the terms and conditions that protects the members of our team from those who would rage quit and take their toys they built for the game with them and in the process create holes in what is already Swiss cheese code.

Next we as a team are very well aware of the importance of 3rd party involvement and how important it is to relay valuable information as to the future of the game Urban Terror but it is difficult to properly form a response that would imply a promise that we can't keep if once again the logistics are against us.

Basically few people on the team have a full overview of whats going on at any given time that tends to leave gaps as to a correct response but once information has been made public then anyone on the team is allowed to talk about their involvement even though their full involvement can't be complete due to items that are not public knowledge.

What is public is FS has begun a few years ago the “process” of moving towards a rebuilding of infrastructure necessary for Urban Terror HD and as part of that plan to also involve the community in a much more meaningful as well as controllable fashion and is in part why 7of9 was invited to join the team. We are smart enough to bring on board people who are smarter than us when needed.

So things are happening and if you want to know just what then I'll need more than a few pages but known as public knowledge we have a much better idea as to how content for HD will be handled as far as a top down approach to design goes.

This is the key to Urban Terror HD as I've stated in the past we don't know what would be considered a HD map but it does not matter as the process of design over result will will allow for any corrective changes no matter that engine design we land up with and in the long run it does not matter what engine you intend your map to run under.

So I hope there is some understanding here that it's not that we don't care but we can't save the world of Urban Terror one person at a time when faced with a community 50,000 strong.

So with that bit out of the way I'll wait to see what DagF comes up with and and we will see if we can drop some goodies into the design topic.